Today Google dipped its paws into the art industry. Art Project is “a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.” In short, over the past 18 months Google’s traveled to 17 art museums around the world and captured super high resolution images of famous artworks. Now online users can take 360 degree tours of individual galleries using the same Street View click, zoom, and pan techniques most are used to using when navigating Google Maps. Google hit up many world renowned museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, State Tretyakov Gallery, and Van Gogh Museum. And check this: each of the 17 museums hand-picked one piece of artwork to be photographed using gigapixel technology; these super super high definition selections contain around 7 billion pixels allowing users to explore them in extreme detail. For example, the people hidden behind the tree in Ivanov’s ‘The Apparition of Christ to the People’ suddenly become visible thanks to the gigapixel capture. In addition to browsing the beautiful works of art, Google is enabling users to create their own collections, share them with others, and make them sociable with commenting support.

Remember that 45 gigapixel panorama of the Dubai cityscape I showed you back in early May? Well a new gigapixel photograph has arrived, dethroning the Dubai image as the world’s largest digital photograph. A whopping 75 gigapixel image, 360 degree panorama of Budapest is the new champ. The image was taken with two 25-megapixel Sony A900 digital cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters. And get a load of this: a printed version of the image measures at 15 meters long and the image file size is 200GB! But enough blabber. Head over to site the hosts the intertactive image. Click the top button on the control bar at the left to enter full screen mode, scrub around the enormous image using your mouse, and feel free to see what the neighbors are doing by using the zoom slider on the left. You see all those teeny tiny houses scattered in the image above? Thanks to the highly detailed nature of this image you can zoom all the way into them. Mind-boggling impressive, eh?

As we inch closer to the official grand opening of the largest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Dubai, I share with you a 2.3 gigapixel photo of the massive 2,684 foot tall structure. Well technically the image you see above is just the antenna that sticks out at the very top tip of the structure. (But what detail!) The image file is so large it would “break the Internet” if it were to be sent through the pipes. In fact, if this image was printed out at 150 pixels per inch, it would be over 37 feet high! Because of this, photographer Gerald Donovan has created a video “tour” of the photograph where he zooms in and out of detail: